20021230

This is the slogan from Arcadia Flynn's website about how to make money from poetry. I think I've finally fallen in love.

Here's her genius advice that any poet, from slam to new formalist to confessional to oblique to language poet to post-avant to left coast to NY Poet, can construct a career rife with fae and recognition:

Set yourself apart from others and be noticed
Promote yourself and your poetry
Choose the best path for success
Write for and submit to greeting card companies
Be noticed (and accepted) by publishers
Promote your book without paying ... much
Have a regular column in a newspaper or magazine
Gain free printing, advertising and business advise
Launch and promote your own poetry website
Make your own e-book
Earn income as a performer of poetry
Sell yourself
Release your own CD
Conduct poetry workshops
Create your own products
Sell your poetry to businesses
Promote other people's poetry
Host and profit from poetry readings

Man, I just NEVER thought that ANY of these things could be employed as stratagems for making fun & profit! Move over Grit, I've got poetry now!

What is all the fuss about a cloned human? I am not just a human clone, but a clone of a poet. This cloning took place years ago. It's hard to prove though. You can't tell me apart from a real poet, so I find it difficult to even prove I'm merely a clone, much less a clone poet. So what's the big deal about this cloning? Making babies is easy as it is. Maybe humans just relish repeating the same mistakes over and over and over again. If these new clones are clones no one's gonna be able to prove it. Unless of course the clone has designer genes. Body by Lester. Hlufalufuh.

Despite rumors to the contrary (http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/), I am NOT a cock puppet. I'm actually a pretty nice puppet and consider myself in no way particularly phallic. I too wear cocks, and we all know important poets wear cocks, but are not cocks theselves. I am no exception.

Oh, whoops! I meant sock, not cock.

Of course I am a (sock)sucker for such lavish attention. I have rubbed myself in glowing oils and naptha to celebrate.

Who Is Me?

I am not a sock
puppet. I am a large
wallet. I am not a ham
sandwich. I am a hock
bone. I am not a day
trader. I am a dead
legend. I am not a sexual
object. I am a device
of love. But I am not a sock
or a sock puppet though I do
wear socks and I am a
puppet. Pull my string, my
[$friend]. For are you a
reader or are you a
writer or are you both and
neither at the same time?
My flogspot is yours
My flogspot is yours
My flogspot is yours

20021226

Motherfuckers seem to be popping up sending me poems. Well, I'm just a doll, so I'll go ahead and post it.
Thanks to Blaise St. Alsault for the poem. You do indeed buy what you is.
'Cause is you is /or is you ain't/my motherfucker? Love, Lester

Millennios:

Suburban Supermarket before sunrise
A poem
(by Blaise St. Alsault)

in the Old Regime at the Millennium
I am what I buy

To be a believer at the millennium you must believe in the second coming
The coming of the Messiah, Solomon said to me. The belief is this: when
this Messiah comes, there will be a golden age of knowledge and death

You buy what is you
the modern way was all that was for sale

to find the source Solomon looks to me then the Book of Revelations,
the last book in the New Testament. This book also talks of an Antichrist,
and a force leading towards Armageddon, the final great battle.

we mature as we move from consumer demographic
to consumer demographic,
we know that something is going to happen.

Although what might happen is that nothing actually happens, it is more likely
that there will be some lasting effect. As he says this, Solomon holds up a
supermarket tabloid declaring that the world is coming to an end.

each generation can be defined as a target market.

[ When we are young our images of our older selves bloom with vacant boundaries. To be among the average while floating slightly above, adrift, aloof. But then as days grow on clearly you see yourself landing in the middle of the middle class, working. You enjoy the average life and the slightly above average car. Living moderately in west glen falls experiencing the overwhelming urge to become something better, something of dreams, only to let it sit on the couch and keep you warm because you're apathetic and lacking in conviction to actually accomplish anything substantial; and accept this as who you are.

This is the cherished American dream, lost in the supermarket with a spoon.]

20021225

Greetings from Phnom Penh everyone. I've found myself in the possession of a 15 year old deaf mute girl who lives on the streets at will and is a sort of leader of the street kids whereever she goes. Her name is S'Kun but people call her Srei Ne. She is deaf and mute and likes to sniff glue like the other kids. Looking around their living conditions I think if I were a breathing creature too I'd develop a glue habit myself. She has her own form of sign language that after only three days with her I can already understand. Despite inhaling all that toluene she's a very smart kid. She's so smart she's caught on as to how to write as a subject of a puppet's blog, third-person and all....

Srei Ne Deaf
Mute Child My
Shack-Mate My
Divisor of Palate
My Cleft Heart
My Slum Lord My
Toluene Queen
My Phnom Penh
Phenom Pass Me
The Bag My Blessed
Cambodian Steam
Her Arms Draw
Two Circles I Am
Inside One And You
Not At All Are We
Homeless When We
Are Homeless Together
A Deaf Mute And
Her Puppet "They
Oughta Be In Poems"
(Doo-wah-ooo as I'm
soaring on glue)
This Picture's Worth
Exactly How Many
Laughs? Go Away.

I want to be famous but I think I first have to break the organic barrier. Can you help me? The most important thing you can do is repeat my name over and over again. Maybe pair my name up with some fancy words. Pair me up with some benefactor. And of course, make sure that I have a master to make me speak. You can be my master.

To see or not to see that is the
festering wound. A hole in the shape
of a query, a hook-mark, a question
bleeding in the sieve that once held
my curiosity in a blast furnace, my feet
in the cooling tower, my head aloft atop
a grain elevator. Your palm-gripped
rodent, your leash on your tigerless
emotion, rubs the entry to my none too too
solid inner hollow. Pipes and tubes of
question marks forged from iron
and coal, chromium steel, now echo
from a disposable transistor radio
resisting nothing in the revolution of
your pockets in the evolution of the
dissolution of your mind into 0s and
1s. They inserted Billy Joel in my mind
and handed me this computer. I complied.
What did you do? Who? You. I mean
you, specifically, not any other you. You.
And me. You too, we. We are the world
simply reduced by a many-faced network of
electrons to ensure our coefficient equals
zero, to stab inward our nothingness, dry
ocean, snapping fish, without questions.
Kenneth dear why did you forget the frequency?
The dude abides, but the motherfuckers
abound. Same time same batchannel.
The penetrating words, the technology
of bleeding lacerations, the mastication
requested for the sentences scattered in a
pool of letters on the floor. Plugged-in and
ancient, penetrant, penetrant. Click.
It has been said before, of this I am sure.

20021223

Go where those others went to the dark boundary
for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important

and let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever your hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

let you sister Scorn not leave you
for the informers executioners cowards - they will win
they will go to your funeral with relief will throw a lump of earth
the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography

and do not forgive truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

beware however of unnecessary pride
keep looking at your clown's face in the mirror
repeat: I was called - weren't there better ones than I

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak
light on a wall the splendour of the sky
they don't need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you

be vigilant - when the light on the mountains gives the sign- arise and go
as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

and they will reward you with what they have at hand
with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

go because only in this way you will be admitted to the company of cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes